When you’ve been traveling as long as Scott Hirsch has, you know better than to expect easy revelations from the road. In the mid-’90s, the California native formed the noise band Ex-Ignota alongside his friend MC Taylor. By the end of the decade, they had broken off as the Court and Spark, an alt-country group that presaged their spiritually inclined outfit Hiss Golden Messenger. Initially, the duo was roughly split into Hirsch’s music backing Taylor’s lyrics, though it became the latter’s project over time. Hirsch took on more of a live role, and after a year of heavy Hiss touring in 2015, he moved from Brooklyn back to California, opened a studio, and started work on his debut solo album. It’s taken a long time for him to let out his voice—a cool, soulful thing filled with deep reverence for his source material, if some cynicism about the myths it’s spun.
In 2013, Taylor and Hirsch teamed up with Steve Gunn for one-off collaboration Golden Gunn, which riffs on JJ Cale’s logo on the cover. This generation of pickers doesn’t hide their influences, fearing accusations of unoriginality, but foregrounds them, confidently establishing themselves as part of a trailblazing lineage. Hirsch is especially overt in this respect, referencing Cale in “Blue Rider” (“they call me the breeze”), and the “weed, whites, and wine” of Little Feat’s “Willin’” on “Sundown Highway,” influences than manifest deeper in the music. His guitar choogles closer to Lowell George’s “Honest Man” than any Little Feat staples, and channels Cale’s spry equanimity and rickety drum machines. (Given Hirsch’s canonical approach, it’s also probably no accident that Blue Rider Songs arrives through a Tulsa label, Scissor Tail.) Like Phil Cook (pulling organ duties here), Hirsch finds ways of enlivening tradition, dusting on spacey synths to spotlight country funk and dub’s common rhythms, and injecting soulful vocal harmonies to lift the gorgeous, humid atmosphere.
Over the past year, several of Hirsch’s peers have been out searching for meaning on America’s interstates. Cook’s Southland Mission fled to remember the value of belonging, while Gunn’s oblique Eyes on the Lines reflected Walt Whitman’s admiration in “Song of the Open Road,” “You express me better than I can express myself.” Just as William Tyler’s Modern Country surveyed the margins, warning against forgetting the “cultural geography of this vanishing America,” Hirsch’s Blue Rider Songs also veers from the beaten track. It steers onto the “blue highways” described in travel writer William Least Heat-Moon’s 1982 memoir as the periods at dawn and dusk “when the opening road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” Hirsch’s narrator is lost, seemingly exiled, but it’s not the kind of self-indulgent searching where he expects to be handed a pearl somewhere along the line.
He sets his compass on “Loss of Forgetfulness,” gently establishing the self-deceit of those who believe in free will while clinging tight to symbols that seem heaven-sent. Hirsch’s tone is never admonishing, the communal backing harmonies and horizontal groove doubling up as a kind of reassurance: Who wouldn’t want to believe in self-determination while holding out hope that some greater power could come and clean up our messes? But Hirsch knows that the hard work is all his to do, and ventures out into a landscape saturated by pink light, gold houses, and purple diamond suns. Men are “shitty diamonds, cut from the earth” who have to be sent out “to find their worth,” on “The Sun Comes Up a Purple Diamond,” a reprisal of an understated Golden Gunn song that he turns into a soulful romp coated in rusty shimmer.
Although everything here sounds familiar in one way or another, Hirsch has a finely tuned ear: the harmonica on “Sundown Highway” flares like distant coyote calls, and spare centerpiece “Raga of the Sea” distills the moment where loss makes its gravity known. “Who thought this would be easy?” he asks amid luxurious peals of guitar on “We Took Back Roads (Blue Highways).” “It’s a heavy weight.” On Blue Rider Songs, Hirsch debunks the idea that redemption is ever a cakewalk, and finds something more truthful and lasting in the pursuit of accepting responsibility.
